Once the family hub, drawing and dining rooms get abandoned for individual territories

Once the family hub, drawing and dining rooms get abandoned for individual territories

Once the family hub, the drawing and dining rooms have been abandoned for individual territories. Today each member leads a separate life, every room is an island.

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RAMESH VINAYAK

MADHU JAIN

December 29, 1997

ISSUE DATE: December 29, 1997

UPDATED: May 22, 2013 12:37 IST

The dining table has become a ceremonial place; life is elsewhere.

The clock ticks, it's dinner time. The silver-haired man sits, waiting and alone, at the head of a long dining table. Angry, he gets up, climbs up the staircase - along a corridor are rooms with shut doors.

He peeks through the keyhole in the first door: his son is doing aerobic exercises before his blaring television set. Through the next keyhole: a young couple, possibly his second son and his wife, dance cheek to cheek to romantic music on their TV set.

Through the third: his chubby wife, her hair in rollers, is dancing to a lively beat coming from her TV. Mr head-of-the-family smiles, enters his room (his dog following) and begins to conduct an imaginary philharmonic orchestra while classical music emanates from his TV.

Welcome to the emerging, end-of-the-century Indian family home in which each bedroom is a world apart, and self-contained. Where family members lead separate lives - under the same roof.

This is only an ad for a brand of television. But the filmmaker has put his finger on the way middle class and upper-middle class urban families are going. The textbook picture of the happy family with the same taste in food and gods and doing most things together is morphing into one in which individual members are doing their own thing - in their own time and space.

Whether large or small, traditionally joint, extended or nuclear, or nucleating further into single-head families doesn't matter. What does is that the individual keeps getting larger, the patriarch and matriarch gradually move to the margins as the children gravitate to the centre, and their children (often miniature adults) loom, larger than life, in the foreground.

Voices

"A house has now become many homes; it's like a neighbourhood."S.K. Das,architect"Television is cutting down on socialising within the family."P.N. Pimpley,sociologist

Each room, then, is an island. This is the image that architects have to keep in mind when they design houses for families today. "A house now becomes many homes, a neighbourhood with a series of apartments," explains architect S.K. Das.

Or as Gautam Bhatia, a Delhi based architect and writer, puts it, "Even within the nuclear set-up there are yet more nuclear set-ups."

Not too long ago, in the '80s in fact, the notion of a family was that of a group of people sitting round a dining table. Or at least forming a half circle round a television set in the living or dining. The family that ate or watched television together stayed together.

The head of the family decided what everybody would watch. This was, of course, before the channel-surfing era. Even when the channels first began to multiply, he would possessively and proprietorially hold on to the remote control as he would to his place at the head of the dining table and his privilege as the recipient of the first hot chapati.

The dining table and the drawing room, which were the core of the house, are gradually becoming showpieces or vestiges: not quite extinct but like forgotten species carefully preserved in a museum.

Susheel Kumar Jain, 44, a successful fabric manufacturer, who made his fortune in the export boom, bought an expensive 10-seat dining table when he moved into his new house in Ludhiana some months ago. They haven't used it even once.

Television - there are sets in the individual bedrooms - is the pied piper seducing them all away. Thus, traditional spaces are turning ceremonial: the united front of the family for the outsider and the gathering site for the larger family and family portraits.

Life is elsewhere. The action, say architects-who, like shrinks, know best what is happening behind the facade of a home - has shifted to the bedroom. Clients are now asking for ever larger bedrooms, says A.G.K. Menon, a Delhi architect and director, TVB School of Habitat Studies.

"The bedroom has been transformed from being just a place to sleep," he says. "The man goes there to change into his kurta pyjama after he comes home from work. He has his pakodas there, switches on the television, the rest congregate there and it becomes a family adda (den)."

Privacy comes through miniaturisation and gadgetry: a bedroom is a self-contained world with tv, computer and music system.

If two decades ago, the living room was the arena where you displayed your wealth - the items changing over the years: radio, refrigerator, television, video, music system, CD player and souvenirs of travels (crystal, dolls, Taj Mahals) in India and abroad - now the bedroom has it all.

"Each bedroom has become an individual house as it now contains all the smaller elements of a house," says Bhatia.

Whether it is high-rise, space-starved Mumbai, the more expansive Delhi, or smaller cities, there is a demand for such bedrooms and private spaces. People are making complex architectural demands for such "breathing places" as the growing sense of individualism piggybacks on consumerism into close-knit family citadels, much of because of the ubiquitous TV.

Why? With every new channel in the post-satellite age, there's an added dilemma. So if one member wants to watch India play Pakistan, another wants to continue with the loves and lives on The Bold and the Beautiful and yet another may want to dance to MTV music or watch the great Indian political soap opera on the news programmes.

Similarly, music means different things to individual members of the family. Even the littlest members of the family want rooms of their own. Parents too want children to stay home because of crime, explains Menon. "We went to the maidan and played; our children play indoor games."

Architect Vikas Sharma has independent sessions with children to accommodate their needs. "Each one is asking for a domain for himself under one roof," he says. And it's not just beds: in their rooms they want seating spaces for their guests and separate entertainment-such as ludicrously expensive home theatre systems.

A well-to-do businessman recently spent Rs 15 lakh just on the bedroom house of his school-going son. Once-upon-a-time, family was friends.

Voices

"The power centre has moved from father to other members."Rajesh Parikh,neuro-psychiatrist"Even children want a domain for themselves under one roof."Vikas Sharma,architect

Cousins were pals and what friends there were became part of the entire family. Now individual friends are becoming family, and some family members strangers.

Today, with a certain amount of TV-and-media-generated liberalisation, friends of both sexes come home. They are not necessarily friends of the whole family. So, there's need for more privacy, preferably behind closed doors.

Photographer Dayanita Singh, who has been looking at the Indian family through her lens, observes that the biological family is being gradually nudged aside by friends and, interestingly, pets. Singh asks her subjects to compose their own portraits.

And often, a cousin or sibling are left out but the pets have to be in the picture. "I see fewer grandparents but more dogs and cats and even objects like the piano and paintings in the frame."

Architects have never been as taxed for ingenuity in creating individual rooms as they are now. Words like den, deck, family room came into the vocabulary only seven years ago, according to Mumbai architect Hafeez Contractor.

The standard one-room-kitchen flat has given way to many-roomed houses as new residential areas open up and younger people move out in search of independent lifestyles. "People's sense of personal space has changed. So we carve out space from balconies," says Contractor.

In the recently redone home of musician Kalyanji (of Kalyanji-Anandji fame) in south Mumbai, the balcony has been brought into the enlarged bedroom of his son and daughter-in-law: it's the new home for their daughter's piano on which she will play western music.

Mumbai architects and interior designers are breaking larger rooms into ever smaller ones with the help of technology. "Mumbai is becoming a mini-New York. You get privacy through miniaturisation and gadgetry," explains Das.

Take the family of four which live in a 550 sq ft area. The teenage daughter's 9 ft by 7 ft room has a single bed and a composite pull-out study table which has a computer platform, a tiny television, a small music system with miniaturised Bose speakers.

Her college-going brother has an identical room. And both, to save space, have sliding doors which open directly into the family's small living room. But those doors seldom open. Like those of an increasing number of young - and even older - people elsewhere. The rest of the world is shut out at will, and brought in at will.

Even food, that eternal glue of family ties, is becoming more of an individual thing. So while the dining room is becoming redundant, or being reduced to a place where family members come and go in shifts, the trolley has become omnipresent. Indeed, it's the new portable dining room. Pretty much like in hotels.

Territorial wars can get serious over the bathroom. Architects now add more: his, hers, and theirs (the kids).

Some houses are even beginning to resemble hotels, with the kitchens serving multi-cuisine food. In the age of instant meals, home delivery, mushrooming fast-food places and varying schedules, eating is less and less a family affair.

The image of a smiling mother ladling out hot food to eagerly upturned faces is fading. In its place we have food warmers, rice-cookers, chapati-makers, short cuts from refrigerators to microwaves and DIY (do-it-yourself) food like soup and noodles, which even children can prepare.

"Hunger is a basic need and once this is resolved outside the maternal bond," explains Delhi-based psychologist Jitendra Nagpal, "even the family bond gradually loosens".

It's not just walls which separate family members. There are do-not disturb zones which are coming up with the increasing number of people who choose to work at home on their computers or writing desk, preferring to communicate rather than commute. There is more demand for creating isolated lives in closed quarters.

Territorial wars can get serious when it comes to the bathroom. And it's the architect-as-arbiter to the rescue who's now adding more of them for those with deep pockets: his, hers and theirs, the last for the children.

For those who don't have the means or the space, they have begun to design bathrooms with two wash basins, an arrangement that will avoid domestic battles over dirty basins-and the strands of hair left behind.

Traditionally off limits to strangers, bathrooms are metamorphing into whimsical and extravagant statements as they are increasingly put on display, like living rooms. Some people even leave the doors ajar, so that guests can take in the splendour of gold-plated plumbing and granite you can see your face in.

The his, hers and theirs even extend to cars and other vehicles of transport which link the occupants of a house to the world outside. Cars have, according to Das, become an extension of the person "just like the room, now that many families have two or three cars".

They have almost become mobile homes, individual tastes evident in the upholstery, music system, music and indeed the other doodads in them.

Voices

"The power centre has moved from father to other members."Rajesh Parikh,neuro-psychiatrist"Even children want a domain for themselves under one roof."Vikas Sharma,Architect

Technology is separating people. The "houseful" sign outside the homes of the new upwardly mobile Indian family is misleading. There are many home alones within.

Architect Vinod Gupta believes that the advent of airconditioning has changed homes from being "open place structures with open doors to places with closed cells". Hence the closed doors of bedrooms: other living areas were too large to air cool.

But, there are signs of warmth returning to the hearth. It's back to the future, at least in the kitchens in the middle class homes of working couples and absent servants. Not everybody is abandoning the dining table for bedrooms: some are headed to the kitchens which now have small tables where the family can eat. A bit like in grand ma's time. Home Sweet Home?

- additional reports from Anupama Chopra

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